How Cheap a Product Can You Have And Still Have Salespeople?
One question I struggled with a lot in the early days was what price points supported inside sales reps. It was clear to me that our freemium offering, priced at from $0 to $19/month, couldn’t really support a traditional inside sales team. And it became clear to me that five-figure or larger ACV deals could […]

What Just Happened To The Talent Management Technology Spend?
What Happened To The Rest Of My Pie? I’m still working on my magnum opus (perhaps never to be finished?) post on the SAP/SFSF/Jobs2Web/all things consolidation in the HRM enterprise software market, but one question keeps pushing its way to the surface, demanding a quick post. It’s a much broader question: what just happened to the […]

Matching Vendor/Product And Buyer Lifecycles
Vocabulary Shapes Our (Wishful) Thinking
This post was inspired by a Twitter exchange with a valued colleague after I tweeted that this might not be the best time to be a new buyer of Oracle PSFT/EBS HRMS given Oracle’s commitment to Fusion HCM as the next generation of these long-established product lines. My colleague very correctly […]

Spend Matters Compass: Supply Risk Management — Understanding the Technology and Content Landscape
The world of supply risk management is continuing to get more and more attention these days. The attention is not exactly new, but it appears that the intent behind it is changing. It seemed that there was a tremendous amount of s…

Science Warehouse: When the Spend Devil is in eProcurement/Catalog Scientific Details (Part 1)
In the US, SciQuest is a vendor I’ll be taking a closer look at later this summer and fall. They have done a remarkable job of beating out best of breed competitors and the ERP providers to capture the largest market share within life sciences and higher education for core eProcurement. But SciQuest is not […]

An Attitudinal Segmentation Primer
Did you know that you can segment your market based on the attitudes your customers have toward buying your products and services? And that if you do this you will be able to separate out high return from low return…

The Middle Market Is Bipolar!
Metaphor For Complexity We often do things in human resource management not because they’re important but because they’re needed and easy to do. A glaring example is the way in which HRM software vendors and outsourcing providers describe their target markets — and the way, by reflection, in which those same organizations describe themselves. The […]